This has been a while coming. Laptop problems, weather, building work....So the data has been collected between October and December. Normal settings. No darks, no dark flats, no lights.....and no artefacts??? Not sure about why.
The fish head is looking down, btw!
IC 1795 is an area of gas and dust and also a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia.
IC 1795 is an extension of the larger Heart nebula or IC 1805.
Removal of the focal reducer, addition of the Revelation x2 Barlow , et voila, F20 SCT!
Tryin gto get to grips with focussing, plus not really sure how much 'seeing' changes. Targets so far are Saturn, Jupiter and Sunspots.
Imaging using Sharpcap, around 1000 frames/2 minutes of avi, then using Autostakkart /Registax.
Jupiter, with Io just coming into view at the top, with the shadow of Io right on the top edge.
30 odd mins of L and around 10 each of RGB
Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and record the colorful expanding cloud as the Veil Nebula. Pictured above is the west end of the Veil Nebula known technically as NGC 6960, but less formally as the Witch's Broom Nebula. The rampaging gas gains its colors by impacting and exciting existing nearby gas.
I left the telescope collecting images of M15 to try and improve on the earlier picture. When I went to turn it off just around midnight, I saw that Jupiter was no visible. So, 2000 frames in L, 1000 in each of R,G and B. Processed in Registax and combined in Photoshop.
It looks like the Great Red Spot is just visible on the lower edge.
The Eagle Nebula, now with 23 mins in R,G and B and 60 in L.
What with the loss of night and then murky weather, this is the first image I have collected in months. Based on 11 mins L (!) and single frames of R and G and two frames of B.
The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula and The Spire) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745–46. Both the "Eagle" and the "Star Queen" refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the "Pillars of Creation" imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation. The Eagle Nebula lies in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.
Moon was gibbous so pretty bright. Nice clear night though.
L: 3hrs 17 min , 102 x 114s, 139 gain, 1x1
RGB: around an hour each, 30 x 114s, 139 gain, 1x1
Wikipedia:M101 is a large galaxy, with a diameter of 170,000 light-years. By comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light-years. It has around a trillion stars, twice the number in the Milky Way. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small central bulge of about 3 billion solar masses. Its characteristics can be compared to those of Andromeda Galaxy.
M101 has a high population of H II regions, many of which are very large and bright. H II regions usually accompany the enormous clouds of high density molecular hydrogen gas contracting under their own gravitational force where stars form. H II regions are ionized by large numbers of extremely bright and hot young stars; those in M101 are capable of creating hot superbubbles. In a 1990 study, 1264 H II regions were cataloged in the galaxy. Three are prominent enough to receive New General Catalogue numbers—NGC 5461, NGC 5462, and NGC 5471.
M101 is asymmetrical due to the tidal forces from interactions with its companion galaxies. These gravitational interactions compress interstellar hydrogen gas, which then triggers strong star formation activity in M101's spiral arms that can be detected in ultraviolet images.
These images were captured on 17th April, the last ones using my old Bahtinov mask. The sky went very murky around midnight, hence the abbreviated data.
L: 34 x 114 s (1 hr), 139 gain, 1x1
RGB: approx 11 x 114 (20mins), 139 gain, 1x1
Wikipedia: NGC 5907 (also known as Knife Edge Galaxy or Splinter Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy located approximately 50 million light years from Earth. It has an anomalously low metallicity and few detectable giant stars, being apparently composed almost entirely of dwarf stars.It is a member of the NGC 5866 Group.
NGC 5907 has long been considered a prototypical example of a warped spiral in relative isolation. In 2006, an international team of astronomers announced the presence of an extended tidal stream surrounding the galaxy that challenges this picture and suggests the gravitational perturbations induced by the stream progenitor may be the cause for the warp.
NGC 5907 is also known as NGC 5906. This second NGC number refers to a fainter part of the galaxy lying west of the dust lane that was recorded by astronomer and physicist George Johnstone Stoney on April 13, 1850.
